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Day: September 16, 2013

This is a repost with some new information on what is happening with food and “pink slime.”

You might be pink slime or meat glue. Millions of this earth’s citizens have eaten the stuff without knowing of their misfortune. We have previously posted about meat glue, but the video link in our post has crashed and burned. Luckily we have another (here’s the link ). but pink slime has slid into and over our and our children’s world. Why are we posting about pink slime and food? Because our government has approved it and many other additives to alter the chemical makeup and appearance of our beef, pork, poultry and fish. Information comes from a blog article by Elizabeth Flock:

When McDonald’s and other fast-food chains announced last month that the infamous “pink slime” was no longer being used in their burgers, some thought the ammonium hydroxide-treated beef cuts had disappeared from our food supply once and for all.

Raw beef. (Jahi Chikwendiu – WASHINGTON POST) But a new report in the Daily tablet newspaper suggests the slime will appear in school lunches this spring (2012) — 7 million pounds of it.

Seven million pounds … of what? Pink slime or meat treated with the stuff. Perhaps, BPI and the government mean seven million pounds of greenbacks as added profit after use of the stuff:

The USDA, schools and school districts plan to buy the treated beef from Beef Products Inc. (BPI) for the national school-lunch program in coming months. USDA said in a statement that all of its ground beef purchases “meet the highest standard for food safety.” The department also said it had strengthened ground beef safety standards in recent years.

Last April, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver reported that 70 percent of America’s ground beef is made with BPI’s ammonia-treated product.

BPI recently said that figure still holds. In a statement, the company called ammonium hydroxide a “natural compound … widely used in the processing of numerous foods.”

70 percent is a huge number when you figure the amount of pink slime it takes to treat a pound of ground hamburger “meat.”

Change.org has a petition up on its site asking USDA to stop buying the slime. Launched by Houston-based “The Lunch Tray” blogger Bettina Siegel, the petition says that “it is simply wrong to feed our children connective tissues and beef scraps that were, in the past, destined for use in pet food and rendering and were not considered fit for human consumption.”

What the heck does, “generously recognized as safe” mean? And what happens when, on one of those days, or during one of those moments, it isn’t safe? Here’s the link to the rest of Ms. Flock’s article.